I ran out of space in my on the drive only to find that there was another unformatted partition in the system that is available. I now want to resize the current partition to take in the empty partition without losing data. Any ideas?

The eternal reminder of how to not lose data... Make a full and complete backup of your existing partiton before you attempt anything of this nature...
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Peter.OFeb 8 '11 at 20:59

1

There are some options, but it would help if you gave us your current partition layout. What is the output of fdisk -l /dev/sda (or whatever your disk's device is called)
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jsbillingsFeb 8 '11 at 21:00

How does LVM address the issue of not losing data when modifying partitions?
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Peter.OFeb 9 '11 at 7:16

@fred.bear: LVM makes it a lot less likely that you'll accidentally delete or overwrite a filesystem, because its basic operations are creating a volume on free space and deleting a volume, rather than creating a volume on whatever was there before.
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GillesFeb 9 '11 at 22:47

@Peter.O That's a very complicated solution even if it's a good pratice to use it.
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KiwyJan 17 '14 at 12:53

I've resized my partition successfully without the loss of any data using the method described here, which generally is about deleting the current partition and creating a new one with the same start and a greater end.

But that is probably not the recommended way, especially when the partition to be resized is in between other partitions, because, in my case I had to remove all my partitions (primary storage and swap) and had to recreate them all.